Adulting

Jake is out of town this evening. I got home right around seven because of a track meet. I put my girls in the bath and started dinner. They went to the meet with me because I wouldn't have been able to make it back to school in time before the after school program closed. They enjoyed it. It rained in various intensities the whole time. They also got to hang out with some of my students, which they loved. After dinner, we got in an episode of The Magic School Bus, and they were off to bed.

As I ran around putting food away, cleaning out lunch boxes, doing dishes, and preparing a few things for tomorrow, a wave of nostalgia came over me. Sometimes I'm caught off guard by the fact that I am the adult in the room. There's no one here to put me to bed or make sure the dishes are done. It's me. How does this happen? I'm a grown up but still feel like a child. I've been a mom for nine years now, but there are moments when I can't believe that another human being is depending on me for pretty much everything. Jake and I still have moments of bewilderment when we look around and say "Two little people live with us."

We pay bills and make weird plans and are pretty exceptionally responsible people. I get caught up in the idea that time never moves backwards. I'll never be in my twenties again. I'll never be seventeen again. I'll never again be a nine year old riding her bike through alleyways in Mesa, nor the high schooler who did her homework on the roof. I'll never be so many of those things again, yet I'll always be all of them.

And all of those things can come rushing back when I least expect it. When I'm the one putting myself to bed. Staring out the window, with the curtains that are always open when my husband is gone, at the night lights of Los Angeles. This city I used to dream about and is now my reality in a way the younger dreamer in me could have never imagined.

Leave a Comment

Phone Numbers. Sort of.

I've been laying in my bed crying for a while now. They recently moved my Grammy from California to Arizona to live in assisted living. I don't think that was the wrong decision as the care she now requires is more than a one person job. It dawned on me that this is the first time in my life when I don't know her phone number. It was a bit startling. I don't know a lot of things about her new home, but I'm sure she's probably laying in bed right now, too, thinking about her change of scenery and all the people she loves, and I hope her heart is full of peace.

I'm trying to write myself into feeling better.

I listened to a song my cousin Kiersty sent me a few days ago. When I got the link, I couldn't listen to it right away, but I'm glad it was unintentionally saved until tonight. I'm so sad in this very moment, and the song made me cry even more, but one of the lines was perfect:

A heart that's broke[n] is a heart that's been loved.

Yes. Sometimes things hurt so much because of how much love is involved. And where uncertainty and love meet...

My grandpa moved on from this life peacefully in his sleep sixteen years ago. It's strange to think about this year marking more of my life having been lived with him being gone than when he was alive. It doesn't feel possible. That's love, too. That's a form of eternal life.

Dying in one's sleep at home in bed after a long life seems perfect. When I got to their house the morning that he died, I walked into his room to see Grammy holding up his shirt that she'd hung across his walker the night before. She brought it close to her face and cried. She didn't know I was there, and I didn't want to interrupt that moment of grief, so I quickly stepped out and gave her a minute before walking back in.

I'm thinking of my time in Chicago, when me and Beatrice were Hattie's visiting teachers and we went to visit her in the hospital in South Shore. She'd had several strokes in the years prior. Her body was frail and her speech was incomprehensible. She cried like a child when doctors came to adjust something with her PICC line, and in removing the tape, they removed a good layer of her paper skin. I understood that cry. That cry out in pain juxtaposed with her smile at seeing us. When everyone was gone, Bea and I sat and held her hand and sang "I Am a Child of God."

On the way home, Bea and I talked about our lack of understanding about why people have to suffer in old age. Strokes, heart attacks, cancer - Hattie had been through them all, why couldn't one of them take her before it got to this?

Grammy isn't suffering like Hattie. And I'm grateful for that. But I don't ever want her to. The end is dragging out, and Grammy's hope is to endure well until it comes. She's working at being brave. She is brave. I'm trying to be too. But tonight I'm giving into grief. Getting it out of my system for a moment. Giving myself a moment.

And I'll sing Hallelujah
You [are] an angel in the shape of my [Grammy]
When I fell down you'd be there holding me up
Spread your wings as you go
And when God takes you back we'll say Hallelujah
You're home

Leave a Comment